you saw her bathing on the roof...

I don't understand. Somebody, please help me understand this.

The common room in my suite is packed full of drunk people right now. There were about eight before, now it's down to about six. This includes my direct roommate, who's sitting on the couch, sedentary, listening to an iPod and singing along (horridly, I might add) to whatever happens to be playing. This is by no means the first instance of drunken groups in the room.

I discovered what could possibly be an interesting experiment, at least from a sociological point-of-view. How many drinks can my roommate have before he 'blacks out'? How many times does he 'black out' before he decides not to cross that threshold anymore? Does he ever make this decision? How many nights pass before the RA catches them in the act, since not all of the drinking takes place outside of this suite.

I don't understand the drinking. As I wrote in my newspaper column a few weeks back, this is the perfect way, it seems, to screw up what needs to be done. To stay in the Honors Program at Northeastern, students must maintain a 3.4 grade point average. But when everyone, it seems, gets drunk 3, sometimes 4 nights a week, how in the world are they going to keep their grades at such a high level? By my count, there are three people on the floor who will not drink. Myself, a friend of mine with similar philosophies regarding drinking, and the RA himself. Out of 17 residents, 3 don't drink. I'm not going to run the percentages on that - I don't want to be depressed.

And this is in the Honors Dorm. I had the option of choosing the Wellness Floor, as my friends who attend Emerson College have, but I chose the Honors Dorm because it is suite-style, and I couldn't guarantee that the Wellness Floor would be.

Besides, one would think that the Honors Dorm would have a good deal of people who are wellness-oriented. Evidently not.

What is the appeal of drinking? That it helps you forget your problems, is the common response. But tell me, what problems do you have? You're a college student. You're not paying the bills. You can do pretty much whatever you want in your free time. And yet you choose a self-destructive behavior. The good times you have now, out in various clubs and such, will be negated and then some when you need a liver transplant in fifty years after you become stricken with cirrhosis.

That's a story I should write for a newspaper. The reasons college freshmen drink, from the point-of-view of a non-drinker.

I've just put on my headphones. Normally, I wouldn't bother. I could just turn up the volume on the computer's built-in speakers, but the noise level, despite my closed door, is too great to make out lyrics in my singer/songwriter ballads.

Just as they have a threshold for how much alcohol gets them drunk, I have a threshold of my own. My own alcohol-tolerance threshold, if you will. How much will I let them drink before it crosses my threshold? At what point do they place the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back?

This is not the first time they've come back in this state and had many guests. And it won't be the last. But how far distant is that penultimate party?